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Some thoughts on the infamous OPM e-mail:
Whether the OPM e-mail asking federal employees to send a five bullet point list of what they achieved in the last week to a OPM e-mail address apparently controlled by Musk and/or @DOGE has turned into an even bigger scissor statement that is usual for US partisan politics. What is going on? (Well, it seems like it was an unconventional proof-of-liveness check on the federal employee base with no plan to read the responses, but I am more interested in the response)
First point - if this came from management, it would be a completely reasonable request. It would be odd if it came from senior management rather than your direct line manager (does a top executive have time to read all those replies?) but not necessarily irregular. It is the kind of thing I can absolutely imagine the CEO doing at a founder-mode startup with a few thousand employees. But it didn't come from management. It came from HR (literally, in the sense that the sender shows up as "HR" in Outlook, and in practice in that it came from OPM, which is effectively HR for the civilian federal government). Indeed, it came from an anonymous role account in HR. (Musk tweeted that the e-mails originated with him, but two courts have ruled, at Musk's request, that Musk is a notorious shitposter and it is legally unreasonable to take a Musk tweet seriously, so they are still legally anonymous)
If I received such an e-mail from HR in my day job at a bank (and I don't think any other large manager-mode organisation would be different), it would be unprofessional to do what the e-mail says and send a quick response cc my direct line manager. In a normal corporate (or, I assume, public sector) environment, you take at least some steps to make sure you don't accidentally become a patsy in someone else's political maneuver against your boss or department. So if I got such an e-mail, my immediate response would be to forward to my line manager* with a note saying something like "Not sure what is going on here - will hold off on replying until you are able to investigate" - and if I did eventually reply, I would agree the reponse with my manager. But the more likely outcome (unless senior management had been warned about the exercise beforehand) would be that the rapid large-scale escalation would lead to the head of the department sending an all-staff e-mail saying "Please don't respond until we have investigated what is going on here" and trying to get hold of someone in the CEO's office urgently. (And struggling to do so, because every senior manager in the organisation would be doing the same thing).
And this is just looking at the office politics perspective, From the infosec angle, this is worse. The e-mail said "don't send classified information", but if you work in a job where you are actually trying to keep secrets, there isn't a short, safe unclassified summary of what you did last week. I am not an expert on the US classification system, but I do know that producing an unclassified summary of classified information (including, for example, the classified information you worked on in the last week) is difficult work that only a few people in each department are qualified to do. The rule in corporate finance departments at banks (where almost all staff have access to market-moving non-public information such as upcoming mergers) and it is "Do not discuss live deals with anyone outside the department, even in general terms." For a corporate financier, sending a meaningful response to that e-mail would be a firing offence. The various department heads (including Trump's own political appointments like Kash Patel) in national security related departments who told their staff not to respond are doing the obviously correct thing.
tl;dr - the freakers-out are right - sending out an all-staff e-mail of this type from HR was irregular, and would have been massively disruptive to any large organisation other than a startup used to working around a hyperactive micromanaging founder-CEO.
* If the rumours are true that Musk is sending these e-mails from a jury-rigged server rather than an official secure US government system, then the e-mail would show up as external in Outlook, and my actual immediate response would be to report it to IT security as a possible phishing attack.
Posted this further down, but it seems relevant enough to have been a top-post response.
Bottom line- I think this OPM email event has resulted in Musk undercutting himself and DOGE for the foreseeable future, and greatly reigned in its potential to reign in agencies without the backing of those agencies own leaders.
There were two groups of people who got emotionally invested in this OPM exchange and thought it was a serious threat- people who didn't understand from the start that Musk and OPM do not have HR power over the government (and so were afraid he could fire them for non-compliance with his OPM messages and changed their behavior accordingly), and people who wanted Musk and DOGE to benefit from a presumption of HR power over the government (including Musk). As far as DOGE's longer-term ambitions go, this interplay has significantly limited Musks' potential inter-agency influence going forward, by drawing the first of clear lines on the limits of his power.
Higher up in the thread, @ControlFreak mentioned a past poster who made a general point that good leadership entails never giving an order that will not be obeyed. The original poster was making a point on individual leadership and how if you have to appeal to formal authority as a basis of leadership you're probably not the 'real' leader. Between de jure and de facto power, de jure authority only matters if it can be translated into de facto impacts. A person with a formal title but who no one listens to isn't an actual leader.
In leadership in general, this means that there are some pretty hard limits to leadership that relies on coercion. The coercive powers may be considered legitimate / followed by others, but even within the organization in which that applies, it creates cultures of compliance where people (might) adhere to the point on the pain of punishment, but little more. Despite the economic theory that an avoided cost is worth as much [value] as a benefit, people who will work harder for the prospect of carrots tend to work as little as possible to avoid punishments. Even within organizations, where you can carry out threats of negative administrative actions, effective use of threats against compliance comes from being clear, limited, and not the primary means of influence.
Outside of an organization, where you cannot carry out threats, making demands / threats you cannot enforce is worse than bad practice- it actively makes your influence worse, by highlighting your impotence.
A significant part of the fear-factor surrounding Musk and DOGE are that there are (were) no clear limits to its power. As an agent of the Chief Executive, there are significant powers that come with the President's sanction, but not unlimited ones. Just to start, the power of the DOGE under the President cannot exceed the President's on authorities. Further, even the Presidency has limitations of what it can do internally- some of these deriving from a Constitutional level (such as the ability of Congress to regulate the military), and some from established law and case law (the executive branch having to go through certain processes when making / removing regulations). And in so much that the President does support someone, that person may have a lot of power in the Executive Branch... but the moment the President does not support someone, they have no authority. Live by the sword (of Chief Executive empowerment), die by the sword (of lack of Chief Executive empowerment).
So from the start, people knew- or should have known- that DOGE's power wasn't unlimited. However, it wasn't clear where the limits were. The takedown of USAID greatly heightened this fear, as if DOGE could take down an agency like USAID, what couldn't it do? Therefore, the fear of DOGE went along with the uncertainty of what it could do.
This incident has drawn a great big bold underline of at least one limit- the DOGE does not have HR power bypassing the Department Heads.
There are long and often historical reasons why this would be a Bad Idea regardless. The term 'chain of command' exists because the 'chain' is a visual metaphor of how one link may be higher, but does not directly touch the links below, i.e. does not bypass the intermediary links. This is so that superiors do not buy their subordinate intermediaries to micro-manage subordinate echelons (where the higher level leader is often disconnected from facts on the ground), and also so that subordinates do not bypass their direct superiors to appeal to the next-higher level leader unnecessarily (both undermining the leader and distracting the higher leader). Exceptions to bypassing the chain exist, but the chain exists for a reason, and so does the metaphor.
By making the power play and being refuted, Musk and DOGE has started to expose the limits of its power.
DOGE will not have direct interaction powers with employees, and thus not be able to leverage its institutional power for maximum advantage vis-a-vis individual workers. DOGE HR efforts will have to work through existing HR channels- which in turn means through, and with the support of, the Department heads who oversee such channels.
This, in turn, makes Musk / DOGE dependent on the cooperation of Department Heads whose departments he wants to cut down- which creates a direct contradiction in interests, since institutional power = authority x manpower x money, and DOGE shutting down sub-departments would decrease.
That doesn't mean such things won't happen- the Trump administration has appointed a lot of department heads with skepticism towards their own departments for a reason, so there probably will be grounds for cooperation if DOGE finds and raises an issue [Department Head] is sympathetic with. DOGE may also be able to pull another USAID scalp, by breaking down a quasi-independent organization (and, like USAID, nominally putting it into another department- which increases the department's potential institutional power).
But it also means that if DOGE/Musk come head to head with [Department]/[Department Head], Musk will either be blocked or have to appeal to Trump to override...
...and if/when Trump sides against Musk, that will be yet another nail tying down the limits of Musk/DOGE's influence.
For such an easily predictable- and I'm fairly sure predicted- sequence of events for an overreach, Musk started to dispel the ambiguous premise of power that DOGE depended on, and has starting revealing the outlines of his institutional influence. Not a good plan, given it was both unnecessary and will limit the credibility of his future threats, and something that anyone who opposes Musk should be thankful for Musk's decision to pick a fight with his nominal political allies, the department heads who just pushed his demand back in.
I don't think there is another USAID-sized scalp to pull. There is a reason why the right-leaning man in the street always picks foreign aid as the first thing to cut - it is by far the most unpopular medium or large government programme.
One of the problems that conservatives have governing is that they have convinced their own supporters that the government spends large sums of money on wokestupid bullshit, when in fact wokestupid bullshit is cheap and healthcare for gramps is expensive. The $880 billion in Medicaid cuts in the House Budget resolution dwarf anything DOGE is doing - indeed I am cynical enough to think that a large element of what DOGE is doing is kayfabe to make susceptible voters think that the extension of the Trump I tax cuts is being paid for by something other than Medicaid cuts.
No, this is just a dodge, because wokestupid rarely gets its own line on the budget. the hundred mil for nursing home administrators who certify that all their employees have taken trans-affirming elder care training from wokestupid 501(c) comes directly out of the money for real care, and if you cut it you're obviously trying to murder grandma (as she yells "where's my penis? Why am I in a dress? What did you do to me?!")
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